Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Excel - The Ultimate Halo 2 Accessory

Posted by Zonk on from the what's-your-ROI-with-the-shotgun? dept.

Lev13than writes "The Seattle Post-Intelligencer reports that a Microsoft Employee has hacked up an Excel spreadsheet that performs 'advanced analysis' on a player's Halo 2 stats. The spreadsheet tracks statistics including average kills, deaths and ranking over time, and displays them with charts and graphs. There's even a decent UI to set up reports. Data is refreshed automatically via RSS feeds from Bungie.net. The file can be found here." Bungie's RSS tracking is something we've touched on before.

3 of 34 comments (clear)

  1. H2SA kicks ass by SeaEye420 · · Score: 4, Informative

    For those that don't want to spend $300(or whatever the going rate is for Excel2003, which is required) just to see some fancy stats, check out this Halo 2 Stats Aggregator. It's cross platform(actually, it's just a perl script) and it's GPL, so if you like some stats that aren't calculated yet you can just code them up yourself. And, you can probably submit patches to Matt so that we can all benefit from your beautiful work. :)

    Thanks Matt, H2SA rocks!

    --
    Wort Wort Wort!
  2. Product Placement by Red+Moose · · Score: 4, Insightful
    This is advertising and product/brand placement gone too far. When I read this stuff in a newspaper I wonder does anyone believe it's an actual article or is it basically advertising - there's no need to mention:

    Microsoft (14 times) Halo 2 (12 times) Excel (11 times)

    Halo 2 stuff was everywhere - marketed to the kids but now they are trying to get to the money market of 25-35 yo people (the PS2 market).

    It's a sure fire way to get people to pirate copies of Office XP though. This Seattle Times "article" is an advert, nothing more.

    --

    Acting stupid isn't much fun when there's someone around who knows better

  3. Re:wowsa! by DavidD_CA · · Score: 4, Informative

    Wow. Please try crawling out from your rock and take a look at the last two versions of MS Office.

    Both 2002 and 2003 have been totally integrated on XML formats and supported it back and forth. Every program imports/exports to XML. Excel can pull data from XML documents like Access from an SQL server. Even FrontPage can edit XML data nativly.

    The new Infopath program uses XML as its native file format.

    Microsoft has done everything *but* refuse to adopt XML.

    MS also has supported RSS. Take a look at their website news articles (the Expert Zone, for example).

    --
    -David